Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

newsletter

Food Tech Weekly: AI’s Impact on Food Accelerating, Whirlpool Lays Off Yummly Team

This is the online version of The Spoon Newsletter. You can subscribe to The Spoon and get deliver director to your inbox.

Over the past month, we’ve seen more and more signals that AI is having a once-in-a-generation transformative impact on the food business. To note:

Yum, the owner of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, sees its franchises becoming AI-first organizations where the technology will impact every phase of operation.

Chief Digital and Technology Officer Joe Park “sees a future where AI is in every aspect of Yum’s restaurants, with generative AI—the technology behind ChatGPT—in the pockets of franchisees.

“A lot of that gets automated in the future, where you don’t have to interface directly with the technology,” he said. “You can do it through generative AI.”

Google released a new Food Mood tool that uses generative AI to create a fusion recipe between two types of cuisine. 

“This playful fusion recipe generator creates recipes inspired by multi country cuisine with the help of Google AI.

Choose whether you would like to cook a starter, a soup, a main course, or a dessert, and select the two countries you want to create your unique food fusion from. You can even select a dietary preference from the options provided, and include specific ingredients of your choice.”

Researchers released a study that found that survey participants prefer AI-generated images of food over images of the real thing.

“Study supervisor and co-author Professor Charles Spence (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford) said: ‘While AI-generated visuals may offer cost-saving opportunities for marketers and the industry by reducing the cost of commissioning food photoshoots, these findings highlight potential risks associated with exacerbating “visual hunger” amongst consumers—the phenomenon where viewing images of food triggers appetite and cravings. This could potentially influence unhealthy eating behaviours or foster unrealistic expectations about food among consumers.’”

Food brands are exploring small language models as a way to supplement food understanding and fluency of the large language models behind generative AI platforms.

“LLMs’ shortcomings in creating credible and trusted results around those specific domains have led to growing interest in what the AI community is calling small language models (SLMs). What are SLMs? Essentially, they are smaller and simpler language models that require less computational power and fewer lines of code, and often, they are specialized in their focus.”

There’s a lot happening at this intersection of food and AI, something that clearly is going to have an impact on the old way of doing things. One of the potential impacts is on employees, including editorial and content creators. The Spoon has heard from some industry sources that some big brands are exploring replacing the bulk of their editorial teams with generative AI. While we haven’t confirmed that this is what was behind the recent decision by Whirlpool to let go of the entire Yummly team, it does make you wonder if that’s something the company is pondering. 

The impact of AI on the food business is something we’ll be exploring deeply at the Smart Kitchen Summit in June (as well as the Food AI Summit in September – more on that soon).

We’ll also be talking about this on Friday on The Spoon’s Weekly Food Tech Show, which you can watch on YouTube, Linkedin, Twitter and Streamyard at 1 PM Pacific April 5th. Join us and ask questions during the live show!

Talk soon,

Mike

Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly

Appliance giant Whirlpool has let its entire Yummly team go. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

The news of the layoffs marks a significant de-emphasis on creating a connected cooking experience tailored around custom-designed recipes with step-by-step cooking.

After Whirlpool acquired Yummly, it beefed up the content team and hired content creators to build a recipe catalog with cooking guidance. It also added features such as built-in food image recognition capabilities and put out a Yummly-connected thermometer (which is still available for purchase). The company announced an update with new features as recently as last fall.

To read the full exclusive story on Yummly, head to The Spoon.

Are You Building The Kitchen Of The Future?

The Smart Kitchen Summit, the pioneering executive summit focused on the digital transformation of the consumer meal journey, is excited to announce its return in 2024. In 2024, SKS will return to its birthplace, Seattle, Washington, scheduled for June 4-5th. Use discount code NEWSLETTER to get 15% off tickets today.

Is The US Power Grid Prepared For The Transition To Induction Cooking?

In case you haven’t heard, electricity demand is shooting through the roof.

After more than two decades of flattened usage due to more efficient lightbulbs, appliances, and factories, the growing adoption of EVs and the explosion in new data centers for compute-intensive applications such as AI over the last few years has resulted in skyrocketing demand for electricity, according to a new report in the New York Times. In fact, forecasters estimate that peak demand in the summer will grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, which is akin to adding another California to an already overburdened grid.

The Times report does a good job highlighting how EVs and higher usage air conditioning in homes are two of the biggest culprits for reversing the trend, but largely omits any discussion of another potential big driver of electricity usage in the future: induction cooking.

And from the looks of it, induction could significantly impact the overall electricity usage of a family home. While it’s more energy efficient in general, a household switching from gas to electric induction cooking will use more electricity. How much? According to some sources, an hour of induction cooking will use between 1.4 kW and 2 kW per day. That compares with about 2.5 kW per day in charging for the typical EV.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Podcast: The Story of Mill With Matt Rogers

If you follow the world of kitchen and consumer food tech startups, you know there hasn’t been much in the way of venture-funded startups targeting food waste in the home.

That changed last year when Mill lifted the veil on the company and its first product, the Mill Bin, a smart food recycler. The company’s unique approach included a subscription-based home food waste recycler and an accompanying service that would turn the food grounds into chicken feed. 

We decided to catch up with the company’s CEO, Matt Rogers, to hear about the journey to making Mill. During our conversation, we also talk about:

  • The early lessons in building a tech-powered food recycling appliance and service
  • Why Matt decided to target food waste after building a smart home company in Nest
  • The challenges in getting consumers to think about wasting less food
  • How better data can help us change consumer behavior 
  • The future of food waste reduction technology in the consumer kitchen

You can listen to the full episode below or find it on Apple Podcasts or on The Spoon.

Is The Keto Cereal Craze Over?

I have a soft spot for sugar cereals.

Having grown up in the 80s eating big boxes of Captain Crunch, Lucky Charms, and Life (my friends called me Mikey!), I still salivate when I see big, colorful boxes with leprechauns and monsters in the grocery store cereal aisle.

So when keto-friendly, processed sugar-free sugar cereal substitutes started appearing in 2018 and 2019, I was excited. Like any self-respecting adult, I’d moved on to more responsible breakfast offerings, but saw these new keto-free cereals as a guilt-free time travel machine back to the land of the magically delicious.

I wasn’t the only one. The product’s early success accelerated during the pandemic, a time when people were bored at home and ordering lots of food via delivery. This led to an impressive series B in 2022, where the company scooped up $85 million. That funding fueled the company’s expansion into retail, and now you can find Magic Spoon in places like Costco, Target, and Walmart.

With widespread availability, the company should now be beating the old-school, better-for-you cereals like Grape Nuts and granola, right?

Maybe not. According to a tweet by Andrea Hernández of Snaxshot, Magic Spoon cereal has hit the clearance bin at Sprouts, a chain specializing in premium brands. The pic, which Andrea also posted on Linkedin, led to much discussion about whether the better-for-you keto cereal trend is over.

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

PoLoPo Unveils ‘SuperAA’ to Turn Potatoes Into Protein Factories Via Molecular Farming

Last week, Israel-based startup PoLoPo announced it has deployed its molecular farming technology, a system that uses a genetically engineered potato to produce egg proteins, at greenhouse production scale. The company’s protein production system, which it has dubbed the SuperAA platform, grows proteins within a potato’s tuber, which is then harvested and extracted into protein powder.

Molecular farming, which produces animal protein using seed crops, has gained traction in recent years. The technique, which the Good Food Institute named the “fourth pillar” for alt protein, uses genetic engineering to introduce animal DNA directly into the seeds, transforming the resulting crops into protein factories. Once the genetically engineered seeds are planted, traditional farming management techniques can be employed to grow the crops until they are ready for harvest.

The technique has gained momentum in recent years, partly because of the cost savings it promises to introduce. After all, there is no more efficient way to produce calories for human consumption than by sprouting them from the ground. By transforming plants into small bioreactors, molecular farming companies can take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness of leveraging traditional row crops as protein production engines.

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

Watch as This Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process

For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material.

That’s because Simmons, who I wrote about last year as he experimented with utilizing pizza automation technology in his San Diego area restaurant, has open-sourced his learnings as he continues experimenting with various forms of technology. And boy, is he experimenting!

And it’s not just automation (though that’s a big part). He’s constantly tinkering with every part of his restaurant tech stack as he expands beyond his original restaurant and looks to create a nationwide chain of tech-powered pizza restaurants. Add in the fact that he’s utilizing a crowdfunding model in which he sells subscriptions and a share of future pizza profits, and Simmons has created a live in-process testing lab for how to build a next-gen pizza chain that everyone can learn from.

One example of his highly detailed learnings that I found fascinating is his post today detailing the cost-per-pizza after allocating the costs of the different pizza-making automation he’s deployed in one of his restaurants. The video, seen below, shows how much each part of the process — dough making, doughball prep, dough-pressing, toppings allocation — costs and how he arrives at a 2024 price-per-pie of $1.91.

You can see the full story (and watch the video) about Andrew Simmons’s new cost breakdown of his food robotics stack at The Spoon. 

Watch The Figure 01 Robot Feed A Human, Sort The Dishes, And Stammer Just Like Us

While much of the startup funding for food-centric robots has been for task-specific fast-automation from the likes of Picnic Robot and Chef Robotics, some of the more intriguing – and creepy – action is happening with humanoid robots.

The latest entry into the “watch a humanoid robot handle kitchen tasks” files is from Figure, which just showed off the latest capabilities of the Figure 01 robot by showing how it can identify food and sort through kitchen tasks.

What really stands out to me is the weirdly human voice of the robot, which includes very human-like pauses and slight stammers. As an example, in one exchange, a human interviewer asks Figure 01 to explain why it handed over an apple. Figure 01 responds with a quick “On it” and then goes on to explain, complete with an “uh” pause that makes you almost think there’s an actor behind the curtain spitting out the lines.

You can see the full story (and watch the video) about Figure 01’s cooking prowess at The Spoon. 

Amazon Pulling ‘Just Walk Out’ from Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores

According to a story published in The Information, Amazon is planning to pull its Just Walk Out cashierless technology from its large-format grocery store, Amazon Fresh.

As part of the move, the company will begin to deploy its Dash smart shopping carts. Like Just Walk Out, the Dash carts have embedded computer vision, allowing customers to scan products as they put them in the cart.

“We’ve also heard from customers that while they enjoyed the benefit of skipping the checkout line with Just Walk Out, they also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store,” Amazon spokesperson Jessica Martin told Chain Store Age. “To deliver even more convenience to our customers, we’re rolling out Amazon Dash Cart, our smart-shopping carts, which allows customers all these benefits including skipping the checkout line.”

That Amazon pulled it from Fresh stores (of which there are 44 locations, nearly half in California) isn’t the end of Just Walk Out. The company plans to continue using the technology in its small-format Amazon Go stores and stadiums (such as Lumen Field).

Read the full story at The Spoon. 

Check Out This Session at Smart Kitchen Summit!

We’re putting together two action-packed days at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit, where we’ll discuss how technologies like AI and electrification and emerging trends like the invisible kitchen will change the consumer meal journey. 

One session we’re really excited about is How AI Changes the Game For The Consumer Kitchen, a visionary talk from the founder of Samsung Food, Nick Holzherr. Nick will talk about lessons learned as an early pioneer using AI for consumer recipe recommendation, how Samsung is leveraging AI for its new food app, and where he sees all this heading in the future. 

You can hear Nick’s talk and connect with him, as well as our other great speakers, at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. 

Tickets for SKS can be purchased now. Use discount code NEWSLETTER to get 15% off the price of tickets at checkout. If you are interested in sponsoring SKS, you can find out more at the SKS website.

Our Next Food AI Co-Lab Event is on April 18th!

Last month, we kicked off our Food AI Co-Lab with our first ever event!

As I wrote earlier, the Food AI Co-Lab is a collaboration that aims to be a meeting space and learning center for leaders who are building the future of food through artificial intelligence. We will explore different topics, engage with our community, and provide information such as industry surveys about what people are doing at the intersection of food and AI.

We had a great time at our first event talking to Dr. Patrick Story, a professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Kevin Brown, the CEO of Innit, about how they see AI changing food. You can watch our conversation here.

And you definitely won’t want to miss our next event, which will feature Chris Young, coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps and Combustion, and Antonio Gagliardi, technology and design lead for Barilla’s BluRhapsody 3D printed pasta project. You can sign up for this exciting conversation on April 18th here.  I also encourage you to join our Linkedin Group where we will be featuring special content from these conversations as well as more of our projects for the Co-Lab. 

We hope to see you there!

The Spoon Weekly: The Edible Barcode

This is the online version of our weekly newsletter. Head here to subscribe to The Spoon and get it delivered straight to your inbox

For the last few years, there’s been lots of excitement about blockchain’s potential to finally bring end-to-end transparency to the food system. After all, once we have an incorruptible record of where food comes from, we’ll be able to track it from the time it leaves the farm until it arrives on our plate, right?

As it turns out, realizing the dream of registering our food on a decentralized ledger and getting everyone across the food system to use it is a lot harder than it sounds. Add to that the doubts that have surfaced over the past year-plus about blockchain and the broader crypto world, and web3 hasn’t really delivered on becoming the food transparency magic bullet.

But even before web3 stumbled, did it ever really have a chance to truly track our food throughout the food system? Except for maybe a cow here and there with a driver’s license, food commodities don’t usually come with digital ID cards that allow you to automatically identify its point of origin. In fact, over its lifetime, a grain of wheat may travel thousands of miles across a number of factories and kitchens until it lands on your plate. 

But what if you could insert the identification into the food itself, where the food has a unique identifier baked (or sprayed, or mixed) inside or onto that can be identified no matter where it goes along the food value chain? That’s the idea behind a form of digital tag from a company called Index Biosystems, which has developed what they call a form of invisible barcode in the form of baker’s yeast. 

The way it works is the company creates what they call a BioTag by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely trace with water, then spraying or misting it onto a product such as wheat. BioTags are incredibly sticky once applied and remain attached to the surface of the grains, withstanding the milling process while remaining detectable in flour. From here, the BioTab becomes, in a sense, an invisible bar code that the company or one of its customers can read using molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing.

Index Biosystems isn’t the only company working on the idea of the invisible, integrated, and edible bar code. In 2020, a group of Harvard researchers wrote about their idea for an edible “bar code,” which they described as a scalable microbial spore system that identifies object provenance in under 1 hour at meter-scale resolution. According to the researchers, the spores would be identifiable for up to three months and multiple stops down the supply chain. The year before, SafeTraces announced they’d patented a system that took DNA strands drawn from seaweed that would turn into DNA bar codes readable throughout the food supply chain. 

DNA-powered identification systems are a compelling idea for a food world in which pathogens and food-borne illnesses have become a big problem. Companies early to this space (like SafeTraces) may have been a bit early, but now, as DNA identification systems have become commonplace and tools have become accessible by almost everyone, I have to wonder if the day has arrived for the embedded edible bar code. 

Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food

Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation.

The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships, creativity and culture, economics and society, health and well-being, and environment and safety.

The study is led by Andy Lin, a philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly.

“Robot or AI kitchens would automate a special place and communal activity in the home, so that immediately warrants critical attention,” Lin said in the announcement. “Outside of the home, restaurants are one of the most essential and oldest businesses, given the primacy of food. They are the bedrock for an economy, the soul of a community, and the ambassador for a culture. But the pandemic is causing a seismic shift in the restaurant industry, and robot kitchens could be a tipping point that forces many restaurants to evolve or die in the coming years.”

Check out the news (and how your’s truly is involved) over on The Spoon.

We’ve Added New Speakers for our Food AI Summit!

As you may have heard, this October we’re hosting the Food AI Summit, a new event focused on how AI will transform our food system. 

The conference, which will take place on October 25th in Alameda, California, will convene scientists, investors, entrepreneurs, and others who are building the future of food using AI together for a day of keynote talks, interactive sessions, product demonstrations, and networking. 

We’re continuing to build a great list of speakers, and this week we’ve added longtime food AI innovator Riana Lynn of Journey Foods. Lynn joins others like Jasmin Hume of Shiru, David Lee of Inevitable Tech, and Kevin Yu of SideChef. We’ve got more great speakers on the way, including maybe you! If you think you have an interesting insight or are building something that will change the world, feel free to fill out the speaker inquiry form and let us know!

Also, if you’d like to sponsor the event, we’d also like to hear from you as well! Just fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch.

And, of course, we’d love to see you in Alameda in October! Our Spoon community is the engine that makes our events and website go, and we are excited to connect with you IRL and talk about this exciting space! If you’d like to attend, we have a special discount just for newsletter subscribers. Just enter NEWSLETTER in the coupon code when buying a ticket for $100 off an early bird ticket. 

Check out The Food AI Summit Website. You can read the full announcement on The Spoon. 

The Consumer Kitchen

SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes

AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak.

That’s the vision of a UK startup named SEERGRILLS, which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.

According to SEERGRILLS CEO Suraj Sudera, the AI works through a combination of sensor data, cook preferences inputted by the user, and intelligence built into the software around different food types.

“The device will capture the starting temperature of, say, chicken breast and adjust the cooking in line with the preferences you’ve inputted in the device,” said Sudera. “Whether it’s a three-inch or five-inch chicken breast, it doesn’t matter. It will be whatever adjustments it needs, just like your cruise control on your car will adjust to keep you at the preferred speed.”

When a cook is done, users can rate the quality of the cook, which informs and optimizes the NeuralFire algorithm for the next cook. Suraj says that SEERGRILLS is also constantly updating its food database, so if, say, a new type of steak from Japan becomes popular, the AI engine will be updated to optimize the cook for that meat type. The company says its AI will also optimize to reach each type of meat’s sear and doneness, as well as help to perfect the Maillard reaction.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

ARE YOU A SALES PRO WHO LOVES FOOD TECHNOLOGY?

If you have experience selling sponsorships for events and building multifaceted ad and brand campaigns for some of the world’s biggest food companies, we’d love to hear from you! A great opportunity to be involved in the world of food tech! Just drop us a line with a resume or link to your Linkedin, and we’ll be in touch!

Cultivated Meat

José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’
 

A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox.

According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.

The meal was served in honor of the late Willem van Eelen, known as the “godfather of cultivated meat,” on what would have been his 100th birthday yesterday, July 4, 2023. After hearing a lecture on preserving meat, van Eelen, a WW2 prisoner of war, came up with the idea of creating meat outside of the body of an animal. Over the following decades, van Eelen would start businesses to save money to pursue this idea while working on it and filing for patents. He would pass away in 2015 at the age of 91, just two years after Dutch startup Mosa Meat would be the first to realize his idea with their cultured meat hamburger.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

Big Week For Cultivated Meat: Dutch Government Approves Tastings, UPSIDE’s Chicken Debuts at Crenn

It’s been an eventful few days for cultivated meat.

After getting the final regulatory green light from the USDA to serve cultivated meat to U.S. consumers, UPSIDE Food’s cultivated chicken showed up on menus for the first time this weekend at Bar Crenn. The event, hosted on Saturday, July 1st, marked the first time cultivated meat has gone on sale in the U.S.

Here’s how the special menu, prepared by famed French chef Dominique Crenn, was described by the press release sent to The Spoon: Diners at this historic meal were served UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken, fried in a Recado Negro-infused tempura batter and accompanied by a burnt chili aioli. Served in a handmade black ceramic vessel adorned with Mexican motifs and Crenn’s logo, the dish was beautifully garnished with edible flowers and greens sourced from Bleu Belle Farm. It reflects the global benefit that Chef Crenn sees in cultivated meat – with UPSIDE Chicken from the Bay Area in California, tempura from Japanese traditions, and an infusion of Recado Negro from Mexico’s Yucatan.

Read the full story on The Spoon.

Coffee Tech

Ansā’s New Roaster Uses Radio Waves To Roast Coffee on The Countertop

While we know fresh-roasted coffee tastes better, by the time store-bought beans make it into our coffee machines, chances are they were roasted months ago. But what if we could roast the beans right before they enter the brewer?

If a new company called Ansā has its way, coffee roasting will come to our office breakroom with its new e23 microroaster. The e23 takes green beans sent from the company and roasts them on the countertop without any smoke or ambient heat associated with traditional gas-fired roasting systems.

So how does the company’s roaster work? According to Ansā, the company uses dielectric heating, which usually refers to microwave heating-based systems. According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

Read about Ansā’s tech on The Spoon.

The Meataverse

Yes, I’ve Entered the Meataverse

Last year, when news got out that Slim Jim had gone and registered the term meataverse, we all had a good laugh.

Over a year later and a few notches down the Gartner Hype Cycle, the salty meat stick company has finally launched its web3 world effort to get people to go online and collect digital art of cartoon meat sticks. The company, which, in a sarcastic nod to Facebook’s new corporate name, has periodically rebranded itself as MEATA on Twitter and described the effort in its trademark finding as something providing “services featuring virtual goods, virtual food products, and non-fungible tokens,” along with “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy, sell and trade virtual food products.”

But now, they’ve gone and done it by Jim, and I’m going along for the ride. Sure, it sounds ridiculous and something an adult who doesn’t eat Slim Jims would probably avoid wasting his time on, but here I am, the proud owner of GigaJim #1070.

Read about Mike’s adventure in the Meataverse over at The Spoon. 

The Spoon’s Food Tech Weekly: ChatGPT and a Nest Exec’s Entry Into Smart Kitchen

This is The Spoon’s online version of their weekly newsletter. To get it delivered to your inbox, subscribe here.

You’ve probably seen folks on Linkedin or Twitter posting poems or other examples of content created by the buzzy AI chatbot ChatGPT. 

Bad poetry is fun and all, but what if you could actually use generative AI for something useful, like answering back office questions about the restaurant kitchen you manage? What if it could answer questions like “What are my top selling items this week?” or “I only have 20lbs of chicken in inventory, what’s the chance I’m going to run out today?”

That’s what the team at ClearCOGS wanted to achieve with the recent integration of their restaurant operations software and ChatGPT. 

I’ve seen other interesting examples of generative AI at work in other food verticals, which is why we’ve decided to bring some of the folks building these tools together in a few weeks to explore how generative AI could impact the food business. If you’d like to attend our free event, How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change the Food Biz, go ahead and register here (if you’d like to inquire about sponsorship, drop me a line).  If you are working on an interesting project that connects generative AI to food in some way, we’d like to hear more. 

CES & Food Tech: Year Two

Speaking of events, CES 2023 was less than two weeks ago, and we’re still busy writing up all the interesting innovations we saw in Vegas. Unlike last year when attendance at the show was light due to the late-breaking arrival of the omicron variant the month before, this year felt like CES was getting back to its old self, with the food tech area being especially active.

It was the second year food tech had its own dedicated area on the show floor, and, whether it was the consistent crowds sampling ramen at the Yo-Kai booth, trying out plant-based cheese at Armored Fresh, or watching the cooking demos at the Tramontina and CookingPal booths, there was lots of energy and excitement about the category.

We also felt the same excitement at the CES Food Tech Conference. This year CES gave The Spoon a full day to program, and we had great sessions on the big stage about everything from the future of farming to cultivated meat to space food. We’ll be getting videos from CES of the sessions this month and will be featuring some of those on The Spoon.

And, naturally, we couldn’t go to CES without having a party for the food tech community. The Spoon Food Tech happy hour was a lot of fun, and it featured one of the first-ever tastings of Pairwise’s gene-edited mustard greens.

As the world’s biggest tech conference, CES sets the agenda every year in the world of innovation, and we are excited to help shine the spotlight on food tech. We’ll be bringing it back again next year and hope you can be involved in some way. Drop me a line if you’d like to get an early start on participating in the CES 2024 food tech program. 

As for CES 2023, we are wrapping up our CES Food Tech report, which will publish next week. We’ll be looking at every company that we found showcasing something interesting in food tech, so keep an eye out for that. 

Food Tech 2023 Survey

We are going to be sending out our annual food tech outlook survey next week to our newsletter subscribers.  The survey will be a part of an ongoing set of surveys this year we’ll be fielding as part of a broader expansion of our research efforts at The Spoon. If you’d like to participate in our smaller focused surveys highlighting specific topics, I’d encourage you to sign up for The Spoon’s food tech research panel. 

That’s it for now.  We’re excited to bring you news and analysis from the world of food tech this year. On to the stories…

Until next week,

Mike

How will new tools like ChatGPT impact the world of food? We’ll be discussing just that during the Spoon’s mini-summit on February 15th. The event is free, so register here today before the session fills up. 

Mill Wants You to Create Chicken Feed Out of Food Scraps

Want to stop sending food waste to the landfill?

A new device and service from a company called Mill will help you do just that while also letting you feed a chicken or two while you’re at it.

Debuting this week, the Mill kitchen bin, a new eponymous device from a company founded by a couple of ex-Nest execs, will take your food waste and shrink & “de-stink” it as it turns into what it calls Food Grounds, something the company says is a “safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient.”

Here’s how it works:

You sign up for a Mill “Membership,” a $33-a-month subscription service that includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. You connect the Mill to Wi-Fi, activate it using the Mill app, and start tossing in your food scraps. Once the bin is full, you put your Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.

You can read the full story here on The Spoon.

Evigence Raises $18M for Its Food Freshness Sensors Small Enough to Fit on a Packaging Sticker

Food technology company Evigence announced the close of an $18m series B funding round this week. The company, which makes real-time food freshness detecting sensors, plans to use the money to further develop its system’s data collection and analytics capabilities and launch additional commercial partnerships in the US and Europe

Evigence’s sensors, which are small enough to be incorporated into a sticker that goes onto produce packaging, can detect the temperature and time passage and uses that data to calculate the current and projected freshness of produce. Retailers, distributors, and consumers can use them to determine the real-time freshness of a product. Evingen’s sensors can give visual cues such as through color change on the sticker or have an hourglass empty to let the consumer know when a product is no longer fresh.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Retail

These New Scanners Will Help Us All From Squeezing (and Damaging) The Avocadoes

Every year, tens of thousands of tons of avocadoes are thrown into the trash or compost. Whether on the farm or in our fridges, the delicious fruit is one of the most difficult to get right when it comes to determining ripeness, resulting in a whole lot of wasted food.

One startup hoping to help us reduce the amount of avocadoes going to waste is OneThird, a startup out of The Netherlands that has built a line of spectral scanners that determine the freshness of an avocado.

When a OneThird scanner looks at the spectral fingerprint of an avocado, it compares the data gathered to its database to determine how ripe the fruit is and then sends the information to its app.

You can read the full story and watch a video of OneThird’s technology at The Spoon. 

Drive-Thru Grocer JackBe Opens First Location in Oklahoma City

JackBe, which claims to be the country’s first curbside drive-thru grocer, opened its first location this week in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The store will allow customers to place orders via the JackBe app and pick up their groceries at a drive-thru bay, where a JackBe employee will deliver the groceries right to their car.

The new 17,000-square-foot location carries in-demand products across a number of categories, including produce, meat, bakery, deli, and consumables. JackBe is also planning to roll out prepared meals and local brands in the future.

You can read the full story at The Spoon. 

Food Delivery

Wonder Pulls a Zume, Drops Futuristic Food Trucks as it Pivots to Lower Cost Operating Model

According to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal, food delivery startup Wonder is laying off employees and will begin to phase out its signature food delivery trucks in the hopes of creating a lower-cost operating model.

This is a massive shift for a company that became the talk of the food delivery business for a high-touch approach built around its delivery vehicles. Wonder not only brought the food to a customer’s home, but it cooked it curbside in vans that had become ubiquitous over the past year and a half in the North Jersey market in which it operates.

According to the Journal, the company will pivot to a more conventional ghost kitchen model, operating ten kitchens around New Jersey and New York. In addition to delivery, Wonder will offer in-location dining and pickup at locations.

Tightening venture capital markets have cast a pall over the startup world over the past 12 months, and today’s news suggests that even superstar fundraisers like Wonder founder Marc Lore aren’t immune to investors’ darkening moods. It had always been an open question whether Lore could continue to raise enough money for an operating model that looked incredibly expensive from the outside, and now it looks like we have our answer.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Future Food

GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production

GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.

Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.

GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Aqua Cultured Foods Building Manufacturing Plant to Commercialize Fermentation-Derived Seafood

Chicago-based food tech start-up Aqua Cultured Foods has begun building a new manufacturing facility for its plant-based seafood products in the West Loop area of the city. The facility, nearly three times the size of Aqua’s current base, is already food-grade and requires minimal upgrades to enable the company to scale production of its fermentation-derived protein.

According to the company, their production methods use standard food production equipment, allowing quicker buildout. Aquaculture says its production methods are also space-efficient, comparing their space usage to vertical farming.

To read the full story, click here. 

Food Robotics

Watch LG’s Server Robot Bring Dishes to Customers at Popular Korean Restaurant in Georgia

One year ago, LG announced the debut of its new hospitality server robot, and now the Korean tech giant’s CLOi Servebot is showing up at restaurants like the Airang K in Johns Creek, Georgia. Since June 2022, four “LG CLOi ServeBot” robotic assistants from LG have been assisting wait staff by accompanying them to guests’ tables while carrying multiple dishes at once.

Initially, Arirang K had deployed two of the Servebots to help their employees but soon upgraded to four. “Everybody liked the first two so much that we upgraded to four LG ServeBots to maximize service levels and guarantee that every customer gets to see the robots in action,” said Miok Kim, general manager of Arirang K.

The LG Servebot has 11 hours of operating time and three shelves that hold up to 22 pounds. They also feature sensors and cameras that enable autonomous driving, obstacle avoidance, and recognition.

To read the full story, click here!

Google’s Farm Tech Moonshot Mineral Becomes Alphabet Company

Google parent company Alphabet has added a new company to its portfolio this week in Mineral, a farm tech startup that spent the last five years incubating within Google’s X.

The news of Mineral’s graduation to full-fledged Alphabet company came in the form a blog post by Mineral CEO Elliott Grant (previously of Shopwell, a shopping startup sold to Innit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mineral is to “help scale sustainable agriculture”, which they are doing by “developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world – and make it useful and actionable.”

According to Mineral, they have analyzed over 10% of the total farmland on Earth, modeled more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance ML models. Mineral’s ag-optimized analysis tools will be used to process large unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, public databases, and Mineral’s own proprietary data streams. The company will make this data available to partners to combine this data with their private data to derive insights into yield, genomic understanding, and agronomic discovery.

To read the full story, click here. 

The Spoon Weekly: Coffee Balls, Insect-Powered Upcycling & More

Welcome to the Spoon newsletter, online edition. Subscribe to The Spoon to get it delivered straight to your inbox.

SKS Is in Two Weeks! Check out our speakers, workshops, interactive sessions and more!  We’ll also be having our exhibition and networking in a metaverse space built just for SKS! Multi-person tickets available

Does CoffeeB’s Podless Coffee Machine Have a Fighting Chance Against The Keurig?

Swiss retail giant Migros dropped a giant surprise on the coffee world with the debut of the CoffeeB coffee brewing system.

The new machine, which took the company five years to develop, is a single-serve coffee machine that completely does away with the plastic pod. The new system utilizes round balls of coffee called, um, Coffee Balls, instead of old-school plastic or aluminum capsules. Coffee Balls, which are wrapped in a layer of algae that keeps the coffee fresh and protected from flavor loss, can be dropped into a compost bin after they are used.

I always appreciate a complete rethink of a system to correct a shortcoming, and pod system plastic and aluminum waste are definitely problematic. But even if the CoffeeB system makes great coffee and reduces waste, does it stand a fighting chance to displace a significant number of Keurigs or Nespressos?

It will be an uphill battle. A quarter of Americans use single-serve coffee machines daily (and 4 in 10 households have a Keurig or Nespresso type capsule system), and while newer approaches like grind-and-brew coffee machines that do away with the pod have been around for a few years, none have really seemed to take off in any significant way.

If CoffeeB is to become the first new single-serve system in decades to garner any substantial market share, they’ll need to take a page out of Nespresso and Keurig’s playbook. This means creating a “Coffee Ball” ecosystem around their technology, which would include a scalable and licensable system to produce the coffee servings (aka balls), a strong coffee roaster partner program in which roasters produce branded Balls, and getting retailers on board to sell the system.

Read the full story here. 

You can hear CoffeeB CEO Frank Wilde talk about the future of single-serve coffee at SKS. Use Code NEWSLETTER for 20% off tickets.  

SKS 2022 is in two weeks. We have interactive workshops on building food tech products, fireside chats from leaders building the future of food & cooking, and a product exhibition in the metaverse. You won’t want to miss it. Get your tickets today!

Asia Pacific Leads in Plant-Based Meat IP According to Report

While many think innovation in plant-based meat is a fairly recent phenomenon, companies, researchers and entrepreneurs have looking for ways to leverage plants as an alternative to animal agriculture since the sixties.

However, there’s no doubt the pace of innovation has accelerated in recent decades amidst a worsening climate crisis and a rising global population, and one way to quantify the innovation is through an analysis of the growth in intellectual property. And now, thanks to a new report published by researcher Roots Analysis, we can do just that.

According to the Roots report, the number of cumulative IP publications for plant-based meat has grown by nearly 3x over the past decade, going from 2,388 in 2012 to 7,126 by 2022. In addition, the growth in patent filings, granted patents, and amended patents (the three of which make up the bulk of IP-related publications) has grown nearly every year over the past decade, with the annual growth of publications going from just over one hundred per year for the decade prior to 2012, to around 900 per year in both 2020 (915 new IP documents) and 2021 (891 new documents).

According to the report, most IP documents in the plant-based meat space are patent applications (77.4%) and granted patents (18.7%). When breaking the documents down by region, Asia Pacific is responsible for over half of all IP (3,717), compared to about 18% for North America (1,277 documents) and Europe (1,310 documents).

Read the full story here.

Food Retail

With Connected Stores, Instacart Continues Push to Become Technology Platform Partner for Grocers

Today Instacart announced a new bundle of technologies aimed at helping retailers digitally power their storefronts. A mix of existing and new products, the new suite is a sign of Instacart’s continued effort to transform itself from an in-store shopper and delivery services company to an omnichannel grocery technology arms dealer.

The Connected Store suite of technologies includes the following:

A new and improved Caper cart: The new suite includes a third generation Caper cart. Like the second generation Caper, the new cart allows customers to drop their items in the cart and the Caper adds it to the list without a barcode scan, but is 65% larger, has a longer-life battery, and is designed to work well in inclement weather.

Scan & Pay: For retailers who choose not to deploy Caper carts, Instacart is introducing a new service called Scan & Pay. Scan & Pay allows shoppers to scan and pay for products with their phone. The service looks especially helpful for EBT Snap users, who can scan items to identify whether they are EBT SNAP-eligible.

Lists: Lists syncs up a shopper’s personal shopping list with the Caper cart app or a grocer Instacart-powered app. Items are imported into the Caper list and checked off when you drop them in your cart.

You can read the full story here. 

Food Retail

Fresh Portal Is a Tech-Powered Take on the Old-Timey Milk Door

When I first saw the Fresh Portal at CES, I thought it made a whole lotta sense. After all, what food-ordering families wouldn’t appreciate the ability to keep groceries or restaurant-delivered food cold or warm until they arrive home from work?

But the idea behind the Fresh Portal isn’t exactly new. In fact, you can go back as far as the early 1900s to find a predecessor in the milk door. Milk doors were built into homes when the milkman was as common as the mailman, an early version of a storage locker where that weekly delivery of milk could be stored until ready for pickup. Like the Fresh Portal, the milk door was actually two doors, one on both the outside and inside with the storage cavity in between.

Fresh Portal founder Jeremy High is aware of the history of home delivery storage lockers. In a recent interview with The Spoon, he said his product is a modern, high-tech take on the old-timey milk locker.

“Fresh Portal is a modern twist on that,” High said. “It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It receives deliveries of the food you’re getting delivered by DoorDash or Instacart, groceries, and even packages.”

To read the full story here.

You can meet Fresh Portal CEO Jeremy High at SKS in two weeks. Get your 20% off ticket with discount code NEWSLETTER today!

Future Food

Vienna’s LIVIN Farms Receives €6 million to Upcycle Food Waste Into Insect-Powered Protein

Turning food waste into a usable commodity might seem like magic, but it’s a reality for companies such as Vienna-based LIVIN farms. The company has announced a €6 million Series A round led by venture Investor Peter Luerssen, allowing it to expand its team and solution.

As a player in the alternative protein space, LIVIN Farms developed HIVE PRO, a modular system for fully automated insect processing. HIVE PRO allows waste management companies and large-scale food producers to upcycle organic waste and by-products into valuable proteins, fats, and fertilizers.

In an interview with The Spoon, Katharina Unger, Founder of LIVIN Farms, explained her company’s process. “Livin Farms customers are largely food and feed processing companies and agricultural players that have access to at least several thousand tons of organic by-products every year. They typically make a loss on it by having disposal costs. Generally used feed substrates include by-products, surplus production from the bakery, potato, vegetable, and fruit processing industry, and pre-consumer wastes from retail and grain by-products.”

One of the critical elements of the LIVIN Farms solution is the use of black soldier fly larvae in its “plug-and-play” solution. A module is set up at a customer site, after which, as Unger says, her company operates it as a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model. The first step is when the organic waste of the customer is recycled on-site by being processed and prepared as feed for the insects. After that is completed, using a robotic handling machine moves the feed made from the organic food waste into pallet-sized trays. The machine then inserts seedlings (baby larvae) and empties the harvest-ready larvae from the trays.

You can read the full story here.

Food Robots

UAE Installs Bread-Dispensing Robots Around Dubai To Help Feed Those in Need

LBX Food Robotics (formerly known as LeBread Xpress) announced today they have partnered with The Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI) Foundation to install bread-dispensing robots throughout Dubai to help feed those in food insecure situations. The custom-built Bake Xpress machines will provide a selection of complimentary local breads and pitas and will give customers the ability to make voluntary monetary donations.

The partnership started in 2020 when MBRGI, the charitable foundation of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (the ruler of Dubai), approached LBX to see if their robotic bread-making robots could be used as a way to get food to people in need. Two years later, the partners have deployed a total of 10 bread-dispensing robots around Dubai as part of the first phase of the collaboration. More robots are planned for the first quarter of 2023.

To read the full story here!

The Spoon Weekly: Home Delivery Lockers, Shopify For Food Robots

Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. To get this delivered to your inbox, subscribe here!

Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Read The Top Food Tech Stories of The Week!
Home delivery storage lockers, cow-free milk, and more!   Subscribe to the Spoon to keep up on the latest!

SIMULATE IS BACK THIS SPRING!
So much is going on in Web3 meets food, we’re going to bring SimulATE back in May! Use The Spoon newsletter discount code NEWSLETTER for 10% off early bird tickets!

New Podcast!
This week we caught up with Stephen Klein, the CEO of Hyphen, who is trying to democratize restaurant robotics with his modular makeline. Listen at The Spoon or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out The Spoon Job Board!
Looking for your next gig? Have an opening? Check out The Spoon Job Board!

A Conversation With Wildtype’s Justin Kolbeck About Building a Cultivated Seafood Company

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company’s June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

I sat down with company CEO Justin Kolbeck to learn more about what he sees in Wildtype’s future. According to Kolbeck, expanding production would not have been possible had it not been able to build a pilot production plant with its $12.5 million Series A.

“The organizing thought there was let’s build a pilot plant on Series A money,” Kolbeck said. “And we built the world’s first operational cultivated seafood pilot plant. Was it intended to be our go-to-market plant? No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.”

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

“If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldn’t have had the data, we wouldn’t have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? Because we wouldn’t have gone through the motions of growing cells, creating the scaffold, seeding the cells on the scaffold, and so on. And now we’ve done that, we’ve learned a heck of a lot.”

You can read and listen to our full conversation with Justin at The Spoon. 

Planning food tech world domination in 2022? Run a campaign with The Spoon!

We are experts in virtual events and webinars, have massive reach with our hugely popular newsletter, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers every month at The Spoon.

Reach out for a media kit and we’ll be in touch!

Food Robots

Hyphen Wants to Be The Shopify for Restaurant Robots

Imagine you’re a culinary student with dreams of owning your own restaurant.

In days past, that journey towards restauranteur would take 10 to 20 years as you cut your teeth, gained experience, and saved enough money.

But imagine if you could build a restaurant today or in the near future leveraging automation and software? There would be no big location remodel and a big loan to pay for it. Instead, you’d use a virtual restaurant model powered by fractional pay-as-you-go food robotics, food ordering apps, and third-party delivery, all allowing you to bring something to market in months instead of a decade?

That’s the kind of world that Stephen Klein wants to build. Klein’s company Hyphen announced this week that they’d raised a $24 million Series A funding round, and so I decided to catch up with him to hear about his vision for the company and the food robotics marketplace.

In short, what Stephen and his co-founder Daniel Fukuba believe they are building a Shopify for restaurant robots.

“Instead of enabling merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon, we’re enabling restaurants to compete with the likes of DoorDash,” said Klein.

According to Klein, the big delivery companies are sucking up data from smaller restaurants and using that to compete with them. He believes if the smaller and regional players – as well as new food entrepreneurs – were able to use Hyphen’s automation technology to scale up new offerings, they’d have a much better chance to compete with the big players.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Alt Protein

Kraft-Heinz and NotCo Form Joint Venture for AI-Powered Food Products

This week Kraft-Heinz and NotCo, the food tech company behind the NotCo brand of plant-based foods, announced they are forming a joint venture to develop a lineup of plant-based food products.

According to the announcement, the new company will leverage the strengths of both companies to develop and bring to market a new line of plant-based products. Called The Kraft Heinz Not Company, it will leverage NotCo’s patented AI platform to develop the food products, while Kraft-Heinz will offer up its production capabilities and formidable sales channels to help bring the products to market.

In joining forces with NotCo, Kraft-Heinz is partnering up with one of the hottest new brands in the fast-growing alt-milk category. The Chilean-based startup has secured distribution deals with a number of premium natural and organic food retailers such as Whole Foods, Sprouts and others since entering the US market in late 2020. The deal also gives the CPG stalwart access to the startup’s patented AI product development platform.

And its this AI platform, which goes by the name Guiseppe, which NotCo cites for its fast success in the US market. Guiseppe works by sifting through huge datasets from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Library and other sources to find ingredient and processing combinations that would best mimic the elements (flavor, texture, etc.) of real meat or dairy in plant-based analogues. The goal is to find the types of combinations that can create a product that completely mimics traditional meat and dairy — a feat few if any plant-based protein-makers have yet to achieve.

You can read the full story at The Spoon

Betterland Foods Debuts Cow-Free Milk Powered by Perfect Day’s Animal-Identical Protein

This week Perfect Day and betterland foods announced the debut of betterland milk, a new cow-free milk using Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey protein produced via precision fermentation. According to the announcement, the new alt-milk will deliver “the same cooking, whipping, steaming, frothing, and baking functionality” as animal milk.

The partnership with betterland foods follows a familiar playbook for Perfect Day, which has previously gone to market with consumer brands incubated within The Urgent Company (TUC). Like Brave Robot ice cream and Modern Kitchen cream cheese brands, betterland milk will use Perfect Day’s genetically engineered whey (beta-lactoglobulin). However, unlike TUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perfect Day, it appears betterland foods is a young startup formed independently of Perfect Day.

That’s not to say that betterland founder Lizanne Falsetto, an experience consumer products founder who previously cofounded thinkThin (a maker of nutrition bars), didn’t create the company with Perfect Day’s cow-free proteins in mind. From the announcement:

“When I saw what Perfect Day founders Ryan and Perumal were doing to cultivate nutritious, more sustainable milk proteins, I felt the pull to not only get back into the industry, but to help build a portfolio of products that taste great, while being better for the planet,” said Falsetto. “That’s when betterland foods was born.”

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food & Web3

GourmetNFT Want to Help Culinary Creators Monetize Recipes & Food Experiences Using NFTs

The tried-and-true cookbook is dead. Long live the fractional cookbook.

The movement toward secure, one-of-a-kind recipes and food experiences are fueled by advances and acceptance of the technology surrounding Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It could be a way to move beyond one-dimensional food presentations and feed the growing number of foodies who want more bells and whistles in their gourmet interactions. And then, there are chefs, who, faced with shrinking margins and the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses, are always on the hunt for new revenue streams.

“It has always baffled me as to why chefs and culinary creators, who are essentially IP creators and artists don’t get royalties unless they get into the whole hassle of writing and publish a cookbook,” Ruth McCartney, part of the team behind GourmetNFT, said in an interview with The Spoon. “When NFTs came along, my mind went to individual recipes and for foodies to be able to curate and compile all of their favorite recipes and cook from their iPads.”

To read the full story, click here!

Smart Kitchen

Haier Patents a Fridge That Cooks Eggs

If you’re like me, you think the refrigerator can use a rethink. Outside of adding a few smart features like Wi-Fi, internal cameras, and touchscreens, the biggest and most expensive appliance in our kitchen hasn’t changed a whole lot in recent decades.

Which is why I was intrigued to see this patent by Haier for a fridge with an internal egg boiler.

The patent, which was issued earlier this month to GE Appliance’s parent company, describes an appliance with an internal system for boiling eggs.

It works like this: The egg boiler is built into the refrigerator door. Once the system controller determines the boiler has eggs loaded into it, it orders hot water into the boiler to cook the eggs. After the eggs are cooked, the cooking chamber is flushed with cooler water to cool the eggs off. An alert is then sent to the user which would open the egg boiler and remove their finished eggs.

To read full story, click on The Spoon. 

ID on the Glass, Please. The New Normal of Walmart Grocery Pickup

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Though I wasn’t even going into the store during my grocery pickup from Walmart this week, I still wrapped myself in a facemask and gloves. Mainly because I was buying alcohol, and last time I did so from Walmart, I had to talk directly with a worker in a situation that was way closer than six feet, and I had to sign for the booze with my finger on a device that presumably had been touched by a ton of other people that day.

But it turns out that a lot has changed in the past few weeks and, at least at my store, Walmart was being more aggressive about safety than even I was. Gone was the tablet to sign; instead the pickup worker asked me to stay in my car, roll up my window and press my ID up against the glass.

Additionally, I saw someone, who I presume was a supervisor, shout out to a customer and worker that they were too close and needed to stay six feet apart.

I can’t speak for the working conditions inside or more broadly — Walmart doesn’t have the best reputation for the way it treats its workers — but from a grocery pickup standpoint, my Walmart is taking COVID-19 very seriously.

There were more changes that I noticed on this trip. Walmart added a bunch of new pickup spots as well. They, like every other grocer, are grappling with ways to keep up with the surge in online grocery shopping. Walmart reportedly saw a record number of downloads for its grocery app over the weekend, surpassing Amazon.

While Walmart scrambles to keep up with safety protocols and meeting demand, there are some signs it’s struggling. I had issues with the app this week, both ordering and coordinating pickup. Like, big issues that even re-installs wouldn’t save. This was confirmed on two separate calls with Walmart customer service, both of whom said there were widespread problems with the app.

Walmart isn’t the only grocer struggling as it tries to meet demand. Amazon announced yesterday that new Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods customers have to wait to be invited before getting deliveries. And ShopRite is putting online customers into a virtual waiting room before they can shop.

Accelerated is almost too soft a word for what COVID-19 has done to grocery e-commerce. With 31 percent of US households using online grocery as of last month, compared with 13 percent in August, retailers experienced a year’s worth of growth in a matter of weeks. Problems in the supply chain and logistics were bound to arise.

Thankfully, the hiccups I’ve encountered have been minor and few. Since I live in a more rural area, grocery delivery is hard to come by, and Walmart pickup has been a godsend for my family. I appreciate those workers still showing up everyday and stocking my trunk. I wish there was an option to tip them, but hopefully they can see my sincere appreciation through the driver’s side window.

Can a Software Upgrade Save Food 3D Printing?

3D printing food has long held the promise of unlocking sci-fi-like benefits for society. Think of a machine teleporting sushi or creating highly customized food on the spot made just for you.

But 3D food printing has stalled in recent years, and as Spoon Founder Mike Wolf reported this week, the answer to kickstarting it might be better software, writing:

[Marine Coré] Baillais, the founder of a French 3D food printing consultancy called The Digital Patisserie (La Pâtisserie Numérique), told me that the reason general purpose 3D printing software doesn’t work well is it’s designed to print with \materials like plastic filament, not food paste. This usually leads to less than optimal results because a food paste has unique characteristics that make it much different than filament.

It’s actually a pretty cool idea and you should check out his full story for more details (plus, Notre Dame inspired food printing).

During a Pandemic, Don’t Be a Pandummy

This should go without saying, but if there was ever a time to be kind and generous with one another, it’s during a deadly pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying economies.

So we were a little disappointed when reading stories about customers tip-baiting Instacart shoppers; promising a big tip for grocery delivery only to remove it once the job is done. That is (*#$@$^ evil. Don’t do that.

Third-party delivery services, which had some sketchy business practices even during better times, got a bit of a slap on the wrist from the city of San Francisco this week. Mayor London Breed ordered a temporary cap of 15 percent on delivery fees third-party services can charge restaurants during the shelter in place. One would wish that a new rule wasn’t necessary for something like that, but… here we are.

We understand times are difficult, to say the least. Be kind where you can. It makes a difference.

This is the online version of our weekly food tech newsletter. If you would like to get The Spoon in your inbox, subscribe here.

Newsletter: COVID-19 Could Help Us Build a Better Restaurant

Welcome to the first-ever Weekly Spoon newsletter that’s entirely focused on restaurant innovation. That we chose to launch this just as a pandemic is sweeping across the globe is entirely intentional. Of all the food tech sectors out there, none has been hit so hard or will change — forever — as drastically as the restaurant biz.

With that in mind, let’s kick this thing off by not rehashing the gloomy stuff. Instead, let’s highlight some ways in which the current restaurant business meltdown is spurring a ton of initiatives that could make a better overall industry in the long term — if we let it.

The Virtual Tip Jar Will Stick Around

As anyone whose ever waited tables, tended bar, or delivered pizzas knows, tips are an important portion of workers’ incomes. With most bars and dining rooms closed right now, an astounding number of what are basically virtual tip jars have popped up online. We first got wind of this last week, when we came across a site called chatt.us that lets at-home drinkers leave tips for service workers in Chattanooga, Tenn. via Venmo or CashApp. 

A little more digging uncovered more of these virtual tip jars in, well, pretty much every state from Maryland to Idaho. One site in particular, serviceindustry.tips, lets you choose specific cities from a list and direct your funds to workers in that area from a very user-friendly web interface. Others are simple spreadsheet interfaces, though no less popular from the number of entries on some of them.

While these virtual tip jars can’t make up for the lost wages and job layoffs many restaurant workers now face, they could at least provide some aid to those currently struggling.

They could also be a valuable tool for the restaurant industry even when dining rooms re-open. As one restaurant owner explained to me recently, in-house staff prepping the off-premises orders don’t see any of the tips left through third-party ordering platforms. A virtual tip jar could be a way for customers who wanted to hand over a little extra to tip those employees for their work. There are also well-documented issues around tipping delivery drivers in general. Since fewer folks seem to carry cash these days, a virtual tip jar could be a way to bypass that aspect of the platform, thereby making sure it’s the worker who gets the tip — not the tech companies.

Ditto for Contactless Delivery and Payments

Three months ago “contactless delivery” wasn’t even a phrase, at least not in the vernacular sense. In an effort to stem the spread of coronavirus worldwide, what started in China (see above image, courtesy of Yum China) has now quickly caught on. All the major delivery platforms as well as grocery sites like Instacart and individual restaurant chains now either use contactless delivery as the default option or make it clearly available through their apps.

I doubt we’ll revert back to the old method once this horror show is over.

At their most basic, contactless delivery methods as well as contactless payments are just more hygienic. Fewer germs can spread when cash and cards aren’t being handed back and forth over a counter, or when customers and their delivery couriers stand a certain distance apart during a drop-off. I doubt I’m the only person who’s ever ordered delivery while having bronchitis. Contactless delivery would go far in protecting workers — many of whom do not get paid sick leave — from illnesses their customers might be carrying while they’re stuck at home. Vice versa, too.

And if this look into China’s (sort of) newly reopened restaurant scene is anything for the rest of the world to go by, mobile payments will see a boost, too. More customers will be using apps like Apple Pay, CashApp, and Google Pay to avoid constantly handing over a credit card.

Simpler Menus Will Beget Better Service

“Pare down your menu” is a directive I’ve been hearing a lot as restaurants quickly pivot to serving customers through takeout and delivery channels. That means offering only the items that are easy to produce, will travel well, and are ones that customers actually want. 

That’s not breakfast, at least not right now. In a statement this week, McDonald’s announced it was temporarily pulling breakfast items from its menu and will focus on serving its most popular items. Taco Bell also nixed breakfast items for now. More chains are likely to follow.

Of course, these moves are in response to the potentially billions of dollars the restaurant industry will lose over the next few months. I suspect, however, that slimmed down menus could actually improve certain aspects of the restaurant industry, particularly where tech is concerned. Have you ever tried to navigate a Taco Bell self-service kiosk? Finding Waldo inside Google Maps was an arguably easier task.

Smaller menus could also speed up times in the drive-thru, improve AI-powered upsell recommendations, and use fewer ingredients overall, thereby reducing food waste.

In no way am I suggesting that menus need to look like this one from 1973. And who knows? Breakfast and Monster Tacos might go back on the menu at some point. But maybe this strange, unsettling shift in which we now find ourselves can show us that simpler menus leads to better experiences for everyone involved.

Keep on truckin’,

Jenn

Newsletter: Everything We Saw in Kitchen and Food Tech at CES 2020

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Sign up for it and get all the best food tech news delivered directly to your inbox each week!

The Spoon team descended on Vegas last week to try and find all the food and kitchen tech we could lay our hands on. We also held our second annual FoodTech Live event because, well, we’re lazy and we wanted the food tech to come to us.

And now that we’re back in the snowy foothills of the Pacific Northwest, the Spoon team had some time put our thoughts about the tech expo together, record a podcast, and decipher what it all means. 

So here it is, our CES Food Tech wrapup. I’ve got kitchen tech covered below, then Catherine looks at Impossible Pork and what else she saw on the fake meat front, and finally Chris gives his thoughts on robots and kitchens coming out of what has been an eventful couple weeks in that space. 

Kitchen Tech at CES

Because I’ve gone to CES more times than I could count, I’ve gotten pretty good at searching out what matters to me the most so as to make productive use of my time. That’s always been a challenge in food tech since CES and its exhibitors have largely ignored the category. But that all changed this year because of what happened last year: The launch of the Impossible Burger 2.0. 

And while fake meat is a long ways from a smart oven or a food robot, I think having the food tech unicorn choose CES as its venue to launch its new products has just given momentum to everything food-related, included the future kitchen.

What did I see? Well, I wrote a deep dive full kitchen tech wrap-up report detailing everything kitchen tech at CES this year, but if you’re looking for the short-short of it here are the top takeaways:

Personalization is Impacting Everything, Even Physical Space

There’s no doubt, personalization is impacting everything in food (heck, it’s why we decided to have a dedicated event on it). But when it comes to personalization, we usually are talking recipes or diet plans, not physical space. GE wants to change that, and so they showed off an adaptable kitchen concept that personalizes the space depending on the needs of the individual. 

Of course, there was also lots of meal planning and recipe personalization, as well as a couple startups like DNANudge and Sun Genomics looking to help you build meal journeys based on your personal biomarkers and DNA. 

Food Waste Only Gets A Half-Nod

There were better and more capable smart fridges to help us take better inventory and there were smart pantries to help us keep track of our dry goods, but I didn’t see a whole lot of effort focused on helping us reduce consumer food waste. One company, however, that wanted to help us all get better at composting our food waste was Sepura Home, which had a good solution that integrated with your home disposal to route food waste to a composter and liquids down the drain. 

Focus on Full Meal Journey Rather Than Point Solutions

When it comes to the smart home and connected kitchen, we’re used to seeing standalone technologies that show off a cutting edge new technology rather than a bigger solution tailored towards solving consumer problems. I think that’s starting to change, as companies like GE and Samsung showed off bigger ideas tailored towards helping people solve problems and connect the different parts of the meal journey. 

Drink Tech!

There were so many drink tech offerings at CES it was hard to keep track. We wrote about the Matcha making machine, tried out the Spinn and saw new beer-making robots.  We even checked out a new seltzer machine that is targeting reducing plastic waste in hotels and homes.

Countertop Cooking

Being a kitchen tech nerd, I have to admit it was cool have the guy who basically invented the home sous vide circulator give me a walkthrough of the Anova Precision Oven (you can listen along to Scott Heimendinger’s guided tour here.) We also took a look at the Julia multicooker here. 

Once again, check out my full kitchen tech wrapup for CES 2020 here. But first, see what Catherine has to say about fake meat this year at CES…

Impossible Pork at CES 2020 [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

I came into CES especially excited about one thing: Impossible Foods’ press event. The company had teased something major on Twitter, so I guessed we would see a new product — probably pork or chicken. And pork it was!

We got to taste the faux pork in a number of applications and it was juicy and fatty, though slightly more neutral-tasting than traditional pork — a great blank canvas for a number of porky recipes. If you’re feeling FOMO right now, don’t sweat it — you can soon you can sample the faux pork for yourself in the Impossible Croissan’wich, featuring Impossible’s plant-based pork sausage, which is rolling out in select Burger King locations this month.

While eating a bao stuffed with plant-based pork, I couldn’t help but wonder — what will be the next food to make a splash at CES? Last year Impossible stirred up a lot of attention when it won the Best of the Best award from Endgadget, even though it was the first edible food company to show at the tech expo. Now that the company has proven that food is, in fact, technology, it has opened up the door for more food companies to make a splash at CES.

One company to keep an eye on is Dutch startup Meatable. The cultured meat startup, which is growing pork muscle and fat cells outside of the animal, actually had its own small booth at CES this year. They didn’t have any of their actual meat on display, but Meatable’s CEO Krijn De Nood told me that they were hoping to bring cell-based pork samples to Vegas in 2021 for a limited taste test. They plan to start selling the pork on a large scale — pending regulatory approval — by 2025.

I guess that means we’ll have to start building up an appetite for CES 2021.

FlowWaste’s image recognition device. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Other cool stuff I saw (and tasted) on the CES show floor:

Food Robots: Do We Need Them?

While Chris wasn’t able to get around CES this year (save for our event FoodTech Live), he was watching for food robots and saw buzz around quite a few:  

I was unable to attend CES this year, and as such, I missed a bunch of robot stuff. LG showed off a mock restaurant with a robot cooking food and making pourover coffee. Samsung demoed a concept robot that was billed as an “extra set of hands” in the kitchen that could grab items, pour oil and even wield a knife. IRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum announced it too was developing robotic arms to load dishes or carry food to the table. And of course, who could forget the robot that makes raclette melted cheese.

But in the end, he started to wonder: Do we need these more advanced robots in the consumer kitchen? …my initial response to robot arms swerving around a kitchen is why? Are these robotic ambitions the best way to gain greater convenience in the kitchen, or do they just make things more complicated? Let’s acknowledge that there are definite use cases for robotic arms to help those with disabilities or who are otherwise movement impaired. The University of Washington is working on a voice-controlled robot that can feed people who need such assistance. And researching how robots interact with odd-shaped and often fragile objects like food can help the robotics industry overall. That’s one of the reasons Sony teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to develop food robots, and why Nvidia built a full kitchen to train its robots. But in our homes, and especially smaller apartments with even smaller kitchens, robot arms seem like more of a menace than a help, taking up space and potentially getting in the way. A case of futuristic form over function.

You can read Chris’s full piece about the robotic consumer kitchen and where he thinks it’s all going here. 

Newsletter: Tokyo Takeaways, Fighting Food Waste, and Reality TV Style Restaurant Rescue

My dad’s super power is writing thank you notes. He never misses sending one. Ever. So it is with the spirit of Pappy Albrecht that I am transforming this week’s newsletter into a big, wet, sloppy thank you to Tokyo for all the great food tech times The Spoon had there last week.

The first thank you goes out to our partner company, SIGMAXYZ, which hosted us and put on the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan conference. Much like our upcoming SKS: North America show in Seattle (get your tickets now!), the Japan summit featured two days packed with tremendous talks, presentations and demonstrations.

What SKS: Japan highlighted more than anything is that the foodtech community is a global one that is still enthusiastically innovating, pushing boundaries and thinking big. I mean, there was a TV in a plate, and not one but two different roadmaps for feeding people in space, along with a talk on teleporting sushi, for goodness’ sake.

The second thank you goes out to the city of Tokyo itself, which provided seemingly endless opportunities for eating well. I don’t think any member of The Spoon team had a bad meal while there. Whether it was grabbing (many) egg salad sandwiches at the 7-11, enjoying a delicious pasta meal while listening to vinyl in a record cafe, or slurping up ramen noodles in some non-descript restaurant, I learned that you don’t need high-tech for haute cuisine.

Finally, one last thanks goes out a little closer to home. While Mike, Catherine and myself were in Tokyo, Jenn Marston did the real hard work of keeping the site up and running with fresh content. Thank you, Jenn!

Check out some of the best of what we saw at SKS Japan right here.

Image via Hazel Technologies.

Hazel Technologies Raises $13 Million
Food waste was not a problem for us during our trip. It’s safe to say we ate everything we were given. Gladly. However, food waste remains a huge problem around the world.

Thankfully there are a number of startups tackling the issue head-on through a number of different tactics. One way we’re seeing more of lately is extending the life of food itself. Hazel Technologies announced a $13 million Series B round of funding yesterday for its take on food waste. Here’s Jenn explaining their method:

The USDA-funded company makes packaging inserts in the form of sachets with 1-MCP technology that get placed in boxes of bulk produce at harvest time. The sachets (see image above) are biodegradable, 3.5cm packets that can be tossed amid the produce and emit a vapor that reduces the respiration rate of produce and increases resistance to the plant hormone ethylene. Doing so slows the decay of produce, increasing its shelf life of fruits and vegetables.

Hazel joins other startups like Stix Fresh, Apeel Sciences and Cambridge Crops in using science to slow down the decay of food, and help save us from our waste problem.


Deliveroo to a Restaurant’s Rescoo
Finally, in a move that sounds straight out of reality TV, UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo launched a “Restaurant Rescue Team” last week.

It is basically what it sounds like: Deliveroo will identify dead or near-dead restaurants on its platform and send out a (presumably peppy and pretty) squad of staffers to offer them a ghost kitchen within the Deliveroo Editions program, as well as helping out with branding, menu development and pricing support.

It’s a smart idea, and one assumes Deliveroo will use their data to identify restaurants that could actually make them money, so it’s not a huge risk for the company.

Soon your Deliveroo-delivered meals may include made-for-TV uplifting stories with a side of joyful tears.

Newsletter: Knife-wielding Robots, Incubators and Accelerators Explained, and $200 Coffee

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. You should subscribe to it here!

I heard an interview with comedian Neal Brennan in which he said a guiding principle for him is asking “And then what?” He uses it in terms of success and personal happiness, but as a journalist, it’s a good reminder to not just think in the moment, but also look at what lies ahead.

“And then what?” came to mind when I wrote a story this week about how researchers at Iowa State University built a knife-wielding robot. Through a bunch of incredibly complicated math, the robot can coordinate and combine a series of push, press and slice motions to cut up an onion. Sure, the technology is crude right now, but nonetheless: a robot can autonomously use a knife to figure out how to chop food, and even adjust its actions when something unexpected (like hitting something hard while cutting) happens.

When we write about robots now, it’s often in the context of taking over a job that’s menial, repetitive or dangerous. But the ability for robots to do human-style tasks is accelerating. Iowa State’s robot is only on onions now, but carving more intricate/delicate things like meat won’t be that far behind. Flippy the robot can grill a burger and fry up chicken tenders, and its creator, Miso Robotics, has already said it is working on programming Flippy to do prep work like, say, chop onions.

When robots can do those tasks more precisely and consistently than people, what does that mean for our human workforce and us as a consumption society? Over the past year we’ve said that these are questions we need to start asking. But as robots get better and more skilled, we need to start “and then what?” right now.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, drop us a line, or join or our Slack Channel to chat with other food tech executives.

An email newsletter I’ve become addicted to lately is “What’s the Difference?” by Brette Warshaw. In each issue, Warshaw breaks down how subtle things are difference (this week’s is biodegradable vs. compostable).

In much the same way, my colleague Jenn Marston did an excellent piece over the weekend on the difference between startup incubators and startup accelerators. The explainer came about because of our Food Tech Fireside Chat we held last week, I feel like it’s one of those questions that a lot of entrepreneurs want to ask, but might hesitate out of fear of looking stupid.

Never fear! We’ve got your back, shy food tech entrepreneur. TL;DR: An incubator helps a startup that is really more of an idea, an accelerator helps a company that’s already up and running.

You should definitely check out Jenn’s whole piece because it provides more background and insight, as well as a handy list of food tech startup accelerators and incubators that you should look into.

Finally, what better way to wash down this week’s newsletter than with a $200 bottle of coffee.

That’s right. Two. Hundred. Dollars. For a bottle of Elemental Beverages’ limited-batch Gesha coffee which, as Catherine Lamb writes is “made with beans that score 90+ on the Coffee Quality Institute’s Q Grading Scale, which puts them in the top 0.1 percent. The beans also cost a whopping $450 a pound.”

Catherine pounded down a bottle of the $200 coffee (sidenote: she did not share) and came to the conclusion that it was “crazy delicious.” Check out her full review, and if you want bragging rights to your own ridiculously expensive bottle of coffee, act quickly — it’s almost sold out.

One thing you definitely want to get your hands on before it sells out is a ticket to our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle. This year’s show promises to be bigger and better than ever, so grab your early bird discount ticket today!

Future Food: The Confusion around Cultured and Plant-Based Meat

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. In it we cover the alternative protein landscape, from plant-based meat to cellular agriculture to insects. Subscribe here!

Plant-based meat companies are leveraging technology to create a product so good it makes eating meat from an animal unnecessary. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are both doing an excellent job of it so far, and will continue creating new iterations that taste even closer and closer to the real thing.

But where does cell-based meat — still likely a few years from our plates — fit into the equation? If plant-based meat tastes so good people will willingly choose it over the real thing, do we even need to bother making meat in a lab?

This week I tackled that question and zoomed out to take a broad picture of the alternative meat ecosystem, now and in 10 years. Spoiler: Yes, I think that cultured meat has a place in our future diets and is worth pursuing. See if I can convince you.

Photo: New Harvest.

*Is* plant-based meat actually healthy?

My boss Michael Wolf posted that piece on Linkedin got some interesting responses including one from Sean Butler, the Managing Director of LIDD Supply Chain Intelligence and former SVP of Retail at the meal kit startup Chef’d. He said:

I think that consumers may come to see the current crop of plant-based [meat] as “chemical-based” in the future, creating a strong opening for cellular meat, which can be billed as a (relatively) natural and sustainable alternative. Time will tell!

I’d always assumed consumers actually felt the opposite way. After all, plant-based meat is chiefly made up of recognizable ingredients, like soy and pea protein, whereas cell-based meat is more of a mystery — at least for those of us without a cell biology degree.

But just because we know the basic ingredients in plant-based meat doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more healthy. Many meat alternatives are quite high in fat (in order to mimic the juiciness of real meat), and are heavily processed to nail the texture. Despite this, plant-based meat companies like Beyond and Impossible typically market their products as healthy alternatives — which is one of the reasons why flexitarians are flocking to them in droves.

In the rapidly evolving world of alternative protein, it can be confusing for consumers to delineate healthy and non-healthy, natural and non-natural, meat and non-meat.

Mission (actually) Impossible

I got in a bit of a news kerfuffle this week. Spurred by a piece in the Washington Post, I wrote a story about how Burger King will start selling the Impossible Whopper in Sweden.

As it turns out… that’s not the case. A food tech-connected source in Sweden reached out to let us know that the new plant-based burger to be sold in BK is not, in fact, from Impossible and has nothing to do with the famous “bleeding” burger. A rep at Impossible later confirmed.

There’s one good reason that Impossible isn’t available in Europe yet, even while their competitor Beyond Meat is: heme. Impossible produces heme through genetic engineering. While we’re cool with that in the States, the EU is very hesitant about what sort of genetically engineered foods it allows to be sold. That’s one reason why I was surprised to hear that Impossible was moving into Sweden so quickly.

So which plant-based burger can Swedes expect to order from their local BK? According to an email from Iwo Zakowski, the General Manager of Burger King Sweden and Denmark, the new Unbelievable Whopper will be made with a plant-based burger composed of soy and wheat protein. He didn’t give the name of the producer but clarified that it wouldn’t be Nestlé’s Incredible Burger, which is on menus in McDonald’s Germany.

If you happen to be in Sweden and are able to take a taste, let us know what you think, wouldja?

Sausage party

It may not be in Sweden, but Impossible made some other expansion moves in the U.S. this week. They’re now at Little Caesar’s, whose new Impossible Supreme pie is topped with sausage made of Impossible’s “bleeding” plant-based meat.

Interestingly, this marks the first time the company has developed a unique, non-beef product for a restaurant partnership. Which makes me think that we’ll soon see a wave of new plant-based sausage products coming to market. Beyond’s already there, as are some veterans in the alterna-meat space like Field Roast and Lightlife. Now Impossible has followed suit. Maybe next they’ll roll out some plant-based breakfast sausage patties, or bratwursts for the grill?

Ocean Hugger Foods’ new plant-based eel sushi.

Protein new ’round the web

  • Ocean Hugger Foods, who make a vegan raw fish substitute from tomatoes, unveiled a new plant-based “eel” sushi at this weekend’s National Restaurant Association Show.
  • Livekindly: In the U.K., supermarket chain Aldi is expanding its line of private label plant-based products with “sausage” rolls and “chicken” burgers.
  • Nation’s Restaurant News: Pret A Manger is buying British competitor Eat and turning all of its locations into Veggie Prets, which only serve (you guessed it) vegan and vegetarian food.
  • malaymail: In Singapore, food delivery giant Deliveroo will offer dishes from eight restaurant brands made from Impossible Foods’ plant-based meat.

Eat well,
Catherine

Newsletter: Entering the Golden Age of Vending Machines

This is the web version of The Spoon’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for it and get all the best food tech news delivered directly to your inbox.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I enjoyed a steaming hot bowl of ramen that was fast, delicious… and came from a vending machine. Last week, PanPacific unveiled a beer vending machine that uses biometrics to verify the age of the buyer. Briggo announced this week that it is opening up a second automated Coffee Haus robo barista at the Austin airport.

We are entering the golden age vending machines, and I am totally here for it. (You will be too.)

No longer dull black boxes with half-filled coils of Doublemint gum and Texas-sized cinnamon buns, vending machines are increasingly complex devices that are equal parts robot and IoT-connected automated storefronts.

All this is to say that vending machines are the new food court. Only this food court 2.0 requires little real estate, no on-site staff, and can operate around the clock in busy places like airports, hospitals and dorms. Need a meal before your 6 a.m. flight? No problem!

But all the automation and convenience in the world is useless if these machines serve a cruddy product. The good news is, they don’t. Briggo roasts its own high-end coffee. Yo-Kai Express’ menu was created by a Michelin-star chef. And PanPacific’s beer vending machine can be outfitted to serve any kind of craft brew to satisfy even the most discerning of palates.

Vending machines are also poised to change the way we eat. The smaller footprint means more meal choices in a smaller space. The connected devices will provide data on inventory and sales for more accurate and efficient supply chain and logistics. Taken together, this will mean hungry people, especially those in a hurry, will have more and healthier meal choices (and will spend more money).

That sure beats a sad row of Texas Sized Cinnamon Buns.

Elsewhere, it’s felt a bit like the Battle of Winterfell here at The Spoon over the past month, trying to keep up with all the plant-based protein news. While Beyond Meat is set to go public this week, Impossible Whoppers will be available at all 7,000+ Burger Kings by the end of the year. Fake meat is going mainstream, baby! Though, all that demand is generating its own problems, as we learned that Impossible is having a hard time keeping up.

To help you understand the onslaught of plant-based protein news, Catherine Lamb, The Spoon’s own Arya Stark, launched our Future Food newsletter this week. In addition to slaying, she’ll break down all the innovation, deals and developments in the world of alternate-protein you need to know. Sign up for it here!

Also, we’ve been launching our full session videos from The Spoon’s ArticulATE conference last month in San Francisco. Check out talks with Creator, Albertsons, Starship and Auto X, as well as a presentation from the Director of Google Brain.

Finally, with ArticulATE in the books, we’re busy working on our flagship food tech executive summit, SKS 2019, where we’ll be talking about the future of food, the kitchen, food robots and more! You’ll want to be sure to be in Seattle in October, and as a newsletter subscriber you can get 15% off our Ultra-Early Bird pricing by using the discount code NEWSLETTER.

Until next week!